Julianne Moore and other celebs sign open letter about AI training

Some of our greatest creative talents are coming together to make a statement on artificial intelligence. Like a literal statement: “The unlicensed use of creative works to train generative AI poses a major, unwarranted threat to the livelihoods of the people behind these works and must not be allowed.” This is the sensible but succinct content of an open letter written by more signed by over 1,000 artists including Julianne Moore, Thom Yorke, Kevin Bacon, Robert Smith, Rosario Dawson and many, many more.

Accordingly The GuardianThis statement was organized by Ed Newton-Rex, a former executive at the technology company Stability AI, who resigned because he disagreed with the company’s position that training AI with copyrighted works constituted “fair use.” He then founded Fairly Trained, a non-profit organization that “Certifications for generative AI companies that obtain consent for the training data they use.”

In conversation with The GuardianNewton-Rex reiterated that creatives are “very concerned” about how their work will be fed into artificial intelligence. (Several lawsuits are currently ongoing on this issue.) “There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, computing power and data. On the first two they spend huge sums – sometimes a million dollars per engineer and up to a billion dollars per model. But they assume that they will get the third one – training data – for free,” Newton-Rex explained. “When AI companies call this ‘training data,’ they dehumanize it. What we’re talking about is people’s work – their writing, their art, their music.”

Given that this open letter is only one sentence long, it’s pretty easy for the creative community to agree with the uncontroversial statement that their work should not be given to machines without consent. Stars of all calibers from the music, film, television and literary worlds have signed up: Rosie O’Donnell; Harlan Coben; Garret Dillahunt; Liza Colon-Zayas; Kate McKinnon; Björn Ulvaeus from ABBA. The statement was also signed by various organizations including SAG-AFTRA, Universal Music Group, Penguin Random House and more.